Ubuntu is the industry-leading operating system for cloud hosts and guests. Every day millions of Ubuntu instances are launched in private and public clouds around the world. Many launched right on top of Ubuntu itself. Canonical takes pride in offering the latest virtualization stack with each Ubuntu release.

In Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), users can find the recently released QEMU version 4.2 and libvirt version 6.0 available on day one. These new versions have brought a number of key updates to the virtualization stack. Here are the most notable ones:

Included in QEMU are the qboot ROM, the microvm machine type, and a minimized QEMU build. This combination allows for a much faster boot of Linux on x86 platforms.

Each release the Canonical team takes great care in considering what versions of QEMU and libvirt to include. The versions are determined through a careful process where the team weighs new upstream release features, schedules, and bug fixes. For more details on this process refer to the following blog.